


In Trouble

by rufeepeach



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Episode: s02e06 Tallahassee, F/M, Swanfire - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-27
Updated: 2016-09-27
Packaged: 2018-08-18 04:34:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8149250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rufeepeach/pseuds/rufeepeach
Summary: Emma Swan knows Neal is trouble from the moment she meets him, but he’s also everything she’s been looking for.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This was posted way back in late 2012/early 2013, and I realised now that I haven't uploaded most/any of my Swanfire work to AO3. So for anyone who hasn't read this before, enjoy!
> 
> Just a small content warning for mentions of past abuse, mentions of sex, and the fact that Emma is (as in canon) 17 for most of this fic.

Three days after she met Neal Cassidy, Emma Swan knew she was in trouble.

For starters, he was a thief, and a reckless one at that. Sure, Emma herself had stolen food and supplies here and there, but the car was the first thing of value she’d ever gone for. And she only did that because she’d only got out of her final foster home a few days before, and Portland wasn’t safe to stay in much longer. She didn’t think her ex-boyfriend was going to come after her, but she could never be certain, psychotic as he could be.

She always had a reason to steal something: survival, transport, desperate times and desperate measures.

Neal seemed to do it just because he could.

She half suspected that he was some kind of lost son to an ageing billionaire, who could call daddy any time he liked and have the Lear jet pick him up from the nearest airport. No one, she thought, should be able to smile that much when they were truly homeless, fighting for survival.

“Come on,” he nudged her, as they sat on the steps to the general store, in a town fifty miles from Portland, too small to have a memorable name, their dinner in paper bags in their laps. The money was the last of what they’d found in the car, but hot food was worth the spend. One thing about theft was that everything was cold: it had to be, so it could slide under a coat. “Smile. It’s good food!”

She shot him a look, “You’re not gone yet?” she snapped back, reflexively.

“You have my ride.” He pointed out, and it’d be easier to hate his stupid guts if his smile wasn’t so charming.

Her ex hadn’t been charming. Her ex had been a lot of things (ex-lover, ex-boyfriend, ex-foster brother, ex-friend) but never charming. No, the words that came to mind ranged from ‘bastard’, to ‘cruel’, to ‘fucking psycho’. Neal, at least, didn’t seem to be any of those things.

Annoying, yes, with his ‘the world is okay’ smile and his stupid jokes, and she had a sneaking suspicion he was actually smarter than her, and just played the dumbass very, very convincingly. 

But he wasn’t mean, not in the slightest: she had actually felt oddly safe, knowing he was watching her back when she slipped their candy bars into her jacket pocket, as he escorted her out with their paid-for meals in his hands.

If he turned mean, like the last time she’d been this physically close to a guy, then at least this time she’d spent what little money she had on a set of brass knuckles, and knew how to use them.

“My ride.” She corrected, “You’re just a stowaway.”

“And you’re just a thief,” he countered, for the hundredth time, “You don’t own Bessie any more than I do.”

“Bessie?” she asked, snorting, one eyebrow raised, “You named the bug Bessie?”

“You don’t like it?”

She shook her head, bowed it to allow her unusually loose hair to hide her face, and slipped a fry into her mouth to hide her laughter, “I’m not living in a car named Bessie, it’s cramped enough as it is.”

He was silent, uncharacteristically so, and she finally turned her head and pulled her hair back to look at him. He was watching her, an odd, wistful kind of smile on his handsome face, “Living?” he asked, finally, “That sounds kinda permanent, you sure about that?”

Oh, she was in such, such deep trouble.

“I don’t exactly have a home.” She said, after a long pause, “And the bug’s got all my stuff in it. Yours too. Can’t think of anyplace else warm and dry to sleep rent free, can you?”

Her eyes were fixed on the yellow bug, not looking at the boy beside her. He was a boy, after all, for all that he had a good few years on her. No man smiled like that, all cheeky and playful. No man was this optimistic, nor this open and sweet. If she was still just a girl - because women had jobs and lives and homes, but homesick and homeless cast-outs could only ever be girls - then he was just a boy. 

“No.” He said, at last, nodding, “We’re going to take care of each other.” He said it firmly, like it was decided, and she nodded too, because it was.

She felt his shoulder touch hers, felt her head fall to rest on it, and was comfortable and almost dozing before she could think through how much trouble she was really in.

—

Two months after finding herself an odd kind of roommate, Emma Swan knew something was going badly wrong.

She was sworn off men. Not just that, sworn of dating as a rule, romance, sex, the whole lot. She didn’t want anything to do with ‘I love you’s, or late nights in hotel rooms, or loving someone enough to let them get away with murder. Emma had had more than enough of that, with the guys she’d been with when she was still trapped in the system, in foster care. She was done.

But she was also a little bit drunk, and Neal had taken the six pack from her only to down a bottle himself, and it wasn’t as if either of them had had a good meal in a while. They needed another city, a big place where criminal activity was harder to spot. Small towns were difficult. Emma didn’t like them, but cities were harder because there was no free parking, so she was trying not to care.

Neal was just like her, she knew that now. No hidden millions, no way out, nothing more to lose than she had. Everything either of them had in the world was in the trunk of their yellow bug, or carried in their hands.

They’d split a six pack, on fairly empty stomachs. They’d got lucky: the liquor store got nightly deliveries, and someone hadn’t picked up the boxes yet. They’d just been left in the parking lot by the back door, as easy pickings.

Three more boxes were stashed on the backseat, and they’d found themselves a nice field to park in, a decent view of the plains to look out over, and a starry vista to stare at. 

It was a good night, and Emma was, admittedly, a little drunk.

She’d drunk more when she was fifteen and sixteen, when she’d been in the last home and it was drink or face what was going on around her. But the ‘mother’ there had, at least, fed them up on the cheap packaged shit she could be bothered to buy, and it’d been weak mixers Emma drank, mostly, with the older boys in the back yard. The son of the ‘parents’ of that home had been very keen on making her drink stronger and stronger, then having fun when she was too drunk to know not to let him. She should have known then, she thought now, that that relationship would turn sour.

That was the last time she’d had a drink, though, when she was sixteen: it had been too easy, when things got rough, to lose control. Emma had learned through years of other people having power not to surrender hers willingly.

But Neal had no want or need of power over her. They ran together, stole together, drove together. They were best friends, and this, she thought, was the closest she had ever gotten to love of any kind, if only because he always had her back. They were best friends, and so she felt safe to have a few drinks, be a little buzzed for once.

This was the safest place in the world, she thought, as she took another long pull from her beer bottle.

They were sprawled on the roof of the car, legs dangling over the windshield, and Neal was making up bullshit names for the constellations.

“Now, that,” he pointed to a random star, and she squinted as if she knew which of the million spots of light he was talking about, “That is the start of Carrowman, the Farmer.”

She shoved him, giggling, “That’s not a real one. Come on!”

“It is!” he protested, “I mean, it looked more like a farmer where I come from, but that’s definitely Carrowman. And over here,” he pointed in a slightly different direction, “There’s Rendellion, the Ogre-Slayer.”

“Okay, I knew sneaking you into a kid’s movie was a bad idea.” She snorted, but she curled in a bit closer, her head on his shoulder. One of his arms wrapped around her abdomen, his hand firm at her waist - safe, always safe, he never pushed past safe and warm and comforting, and she loved him a little for that - and he pulled her closer.

“It was a decent road-movie,” he commented, “The ogre and the talking donkey.”

“Yeah, well, you’re named after one of the guys in On The Road, right?” she asked, remembering how excited she’d been when they’d gone to a bookstore - Neal loved books, and felt bad stealing them, but he was hoarding a library in a little corner of the trunk and she didn’t mind one bit - and found her best friend’s name in one of the ‘classics’.

“Yeah,” he nodded, “Guy who named me was a fan of travelling, thought he was being clever.”

“Travelling’s good,” Emma nodded, “We don’t need no swamp.”

“We have our home in the bug,” he agreed, “So, are you going to be offended when I start calling you Shrek?”

She sat up and whacked him on the shoulder, feigning outrage to mask her urge to laugh. 

She laughed with him, more than she ever had before. That was worth the world, too. “Yes!”

“I’m calling myself Donkey.” He continued, unrepentantly, grinning, “Cause you’re grumpy, and I have a sense of humour.”

“You also talk nonstop.” She commented, “Funny how that works, huh? Why can’t I be the princess, anyway?”

“Cause I’m not Shrek, not by any means,” he said, sitting up with her, an odd amount of warmth, unaccustomed seriousness, in his eyes. He took her hands in his - they hold hands all the time, to run, to feign being a couple, to comfort one another, but this is different - “And you don’t get to be anyone else’s princess.”

She stared at him: they never did this, the serious talking, the feelings, the warmth in her cheeks and the lights in his eyes and the fucking stars and the alcohol. There was something wrong, this didn’t happen, and she was not a princess, she couldn’t be: she was the baby on the freeway, the kid no one ever wanted.

Neal wanted her. Neal would never let go. Neal was there and looking at her like he’d never look away, and Emma was, beneath it all, still just a girl. She wanted to be wanted, and here it was, in front of her, wanting.

She’d never be able to tell afterward who actually started it, but they were hauled together by their joined hands in between them, and his mouth was on hers, and they were kissing.

It was not an easy thing: they were both a little drunk and out of practice, a little stunned by what was happening, so it was tender and exploring rather than hot and passionate. His lips were very soft and warm, tentative against hers, and she sighed against his mouth because she didn’t, in this precise moment, feel sad or alone or abandoned at all. 

They parted just a moment later, staring at each other, stunned. And then she was smiling, because that was the most perfect moment she’d ever had, and he was smiling too, because he was glad she was happy, and that she wanted to kiss him again.

He helped her down from the roof, into the car, and they kissed twice more - the second time was open-mouthed, and it was a little unpracticed, a little awkward, but the tenderness behind it more than made up, and they had forever to practice, after all - before she lay down in the back seat, and he placed his folded blanket over the front to pad the hand-break and lay back too.

They didn’t speak, in the darkness, but Emma didn’t care. For the past ten minutes, she had been a normal teenage girl, with a normal first kiss with a normal boy who wanted to kiss her, who wanted to hold her hand and be by her side. 

If this felt wrong, she thought sleepily, then she sure as hell never wanted to be right.

—

It took four months for Emma to be ready.

She was, after all, only seventeen, for all that sometimes she felt decades older, and she wasn’t stupid: she’d come out of the system fucked-up, but she hadn’t had it the worst of anyone. There were people, Neal himself, she suspected, who’d come out worse off than she had.

She complained a lot in her head about the last foster home she had, and the guy who’d really got his teeth into her and messed her up. But she’d never been hit, never been locked under the stairs or called names. At least not by carers or families.

The kids on the playground, in the street, at the homes, they were a different matter.

But when it came down to it, she still felt lucky that one asshole, one complete psycho, who she’d managed to escape once and for all and didn’t have to worry about tracking her down, was all the proper trauma she’d had to deal with.

If, of course, you discounted the abandoned-by-the-freeway thing. When she told Neal about that, a month and a half after they met, he’d just held her for a long time, and promised she could call him anytime someone decided to just dump her someplace cold.

They would always take care of each other. That was their mantra and she stuck to it as firmly as he did.

So Emma put her nerves that night down to immaturity and inexperience rather than trauma. Inexperience, that was, with having sex with someone she actually wanted to be close to, before and after. This felt so different to her few times in her ex’s bedroom or at the bottom of his parents’ garden, and she fumbled her hands in front of her, nerves threatening to get the better of her.

“You sure you want to do this?” Neal asked, from where he lay with his hands over his stomach on his side of the bed. He was in the pyjamas they’d stolen from Walmart three states back, a nice change to the boxers he usually had to sleep in, and they’d managed to find themselves an actual bedroom to sleep in for a few days.

Emma’d dealt with a lot worse than sleeping in the back of her car for months on end, but a bed was so, so much better.

Especially for what they had planned tonight. 

He was her best friend, she scolded herself again, Neal could infuriate her and make her laugh until her stomach ached, pretty much in the same breath, but he’d never do anything to actually hurt her. He was going to take care of her, as he always promised and always would. It was going to be okay.

“Yes, I’m sure.” She nodded, and padded on bare feet in her own ill-gotten nightie to lie beside him, both of them shifting to lie on their sides, so close they were breathing the same air.

In the end, he had to kiss her first, and she was glad of it. He seemed a lot more sure of himself than she was, able to be tender and tentative without being shaky or nervous, which she was sure she couldn’t have been if she’d taken the lead. 

It was a little like their first kisses, in a way. They were awkward, unused to one another in this way, unlike in everything else. But everything was also soft and gentle, this first time, careful caresses and slow kisses, safety. 

He kept her safe. He always had, it seemed, and she was certain he always would.

Nothing could go all that wrong, she realised, and the thought made her relax a little more, hold a little closer, smile a little brighter. Nothing could be wrong when they were laughing every time something was a little awkward; when she broke off trying to be sexy, running her hands over his chest, to tickle him and throw him off entirely.

He batted her hands away, trying to distract her with more giggling, teasing kisses, and she really did love his laughter. Emma Swan didn’t believe in love as a concept, the idea of being devoted to all of a person, to everything they were, good and bad, but there were individual things about Neal she could admit to loving.

Loving someone completely would mean she would fall apart when they said goodbye: if she never loved him, then he’d never leave.

Afterward, they were curled together under the duvet, comfortable for what felt like the first time in decades. “Are you alright?” he asked, through the silence, and in truth Emma thought she’d never be anything but again, so long as they could stay here, with her head on his chest and their feet tangled at the end of the bed.

“Better than.” She replied, and he smiled and kissed the top of her head, and she was actually smiling, really and truly, even as she fell asleep.

—

A year after she met Neal Cassidy, Emma Swan started planning a life together.

It had been his idea, which both thrilled and surprised her, and made it seem more possible, more real, more solid. She’d blindly picked Tallahassee, and the dream had grown from there.

She imagined a house on the beach front, wooden, whitewashed and cool in summer, warmer when it got a little cold in winter. They’d collect mismatched furniture, and Neal’s battered paperbacks would litter the floors, and they’d eat pancakes for breakfast on weekends.

She imagined a wedding, somewhere in the future, the pair of them at city hall, binding themselves together as they had a hundred times since they met. She imagined a boy with Neal’s smile and her eyes, and a girl, blonde like she was and as sly and cheeky as her father.

It took a year for Emma to admit to herself, and to tell Neal aloud, that she loved him. And it took that same year for him to say it back, and for both of them to mean it.

And that, of course, was the beginning of the end.

—

Emma Swan had been in jail for three months of her sentence when she felt her heart break.

It happened all at once, not a slow drift but a sudden, undeniable crash, like glass hitting a stone floor. Three months, and not a word. Not a visit, nor a letter, not even a goddamn postcard.

It was the moment, of course, just after the warden told her she was pregnant. ‘Congratulations’, she’d said.

Emma wouldn’t love her baby. She promised herself, when it came out into the world, she’d not let herself love it. She’d find someone else to do that: Emma Swan was done, once and for all, with love.

But, of course, right in that moment she loved it with all her heart. At least for the rest of the sentence, she wouldn’t be alone: she’d have Baby, the little part of Neal growing in her belly. Before she had to give it away, away from her cursed little life, of course.

In Tallahassee, with their new money and identities, a baby would have been a blessing. She would have had the man she loved, and their child, and they’d want her and she’d want them.

She wanted her baby to live, to breathe and be happy: the thought to get rid of it entirely never even crossed her mind. But her baby wouldn’t, shouldn’t, want her.

She had believed until the car keys arrived - with whatever stupid, hopeful, childish part of her was still alive despite everything going to hell - that he’d come back. She’d thought it had been a mistake: maybe he’d been caught too, maybe he’d got lost, maybe he’d seen the cops and thought he’d come bail her out later, only to find she had already been convicted.

She’d believed, really and truly, that he’d find a way to take care of her: he always did. That was what they’d always done. They bailed each other out of holding cells; they ran for their lives, hand in hand, down empty sidewalks; they shared the last apple stolen from an unguarded orchard, if that was all they had to eat. He’d tucked her into the bug with his old blanket when she’d got the flu, and driven a hundred miles in the dark to find a free clinic that could make her better.

He’d worried, and he joked, and he kissed her forehead and held her hand. He’d always, always, taken care of her, just as she had him.

But three months into her prison sentence, Emma had his baby on the way, and no way of telling him so. The package with the bug’s keys in it came from Phuket, and she had no idea where that was but she thought it was somewhere in Asia. It certainly wasn’t in America.

He’d fled the country, and he’d done so knowing where she was, and what she had gone through for him. He did so without even a note telling her goodbye, or promising to see her again. He didn’t want her, not anymore. She’d loved him completely, and promised to do so for the rest of her life, but they were doomed from the moment the words left her lips.

That was the moment when her heart broke, and for the first and last time in her time in that horrid little jail cell, she cried until she wretched, until she thought her ribs would break, until she couldn’t breathe.

—

Nine months after she was arrested, Emma gave birth in a hospital in Phoenix, and two hours later signed the forms to give the baby up for adoption. 

She’d never named him - her baby was a boy, a beautiful boy who already had the beginnings of Neal’s smile, and oh god she thought she was going to die when the nurse took him away - and never would. He wasn’t her baby, not anymore, not ever again. He was someone else’s son: she’d just kept him company for a while. Nothing more.

Her chest ached, her throat sore from screaming, but if a tear or two escaped she didn’t acknowledge its existence. She’d known this would happen, but it didn’t stop it from cutting every string that had held her together. Whatever she was now, she thought, it wasn’t the same as the girl who’d stolen a yellow bug, and set off on an adventure.

Because she loved her parents, all children did, and they left her by the freeway, with nothing but an old blanket. 

And she loved Neal - still did, always would - and he knocked her up and got her put in jail, then left without a word. He didn’t even call to tell her he didn’t love her anymore, to set her free: she wasn’t even worthy of that.

But worst, worst of all, and despite her promises to the contrary, she loved her baby. She had to watch the nurses take him away to another life, another mother; a better life, she promised herself, a better mother. A mother who would love him, because Emma didn’t have it in her to do it anymore.

—

Two hours into her new freedom, Emma Swan unlocked the bug in the parking lot, and threw the few belongings they’d returned to her into the back seat.

She didn’t think about the stain on the passenger seat, from where they’d spilt the one and only bottle of wine they’d ever successfully stolen. She didn’t think about the dent in the back from where Neal’d nearly crashed them into a wall in Nevada, because he’d put it into reverse by accident. She didn’t remember the sex in the backseat, or the laughter that rang through the air, or the days he tried to distract her from driving by kissing her neck or tickling her ribs.

And everyday she didn’t think about it, the less she was inclined to do so.

She got herself a job, wore her hair down, got contact lenses and a health plan. Tallahassee was as warm and beautiful as she ever imagined, and that she was enjoying it alone, she told herself, only made her love it more.

She’d found a life where love wasn’t even a factor. Where all she needed or knew was that she loved her car, her apartment, her ability to do whatever she wanted, and her job where she could get paid to bring down assholes who left their loved ones in ruin and ran off without a word. 

And that was enough, even if she never sold the bug, or changed her keychain. She’d just not got around to it yet, she told herself, one day she would.

—

Ten years after she got out of jail, Emma found that she was genuinely contented with her life. She was alone, yes, but also stable, numbed in all her aching places and strong enough to walk with her head high.

And then there was a knock on the door, and despite her skepticism - Emma had played the skeptic for a decade now, and old habits died hard - she knew instantly who this child is. 

Neal’s smile was looking back at her, with her eyes set in the boy’s face.

Eleven years after she met Neal Cassidy, Emma Swan knew she was still in deep, deep trouble.


End file.
